5 sound design-focused YouTube channels worth following

There are lots of Youtube channels out there, but finding the good ones when it comes to sound-related content can be tricky. To help you find the good stuff, Mike James Gallagher has picked 5 interesting channels to get you started - and he's also highlighting some of his favorite videos from the channels. Oh, and while you're at it, be sure to subscribe to the A Sound Effect Youtube channel - that one's right here. Happy watching!
Written by Mike James Gallagher

Akash Thakkar is an award winning composer/sound designer/public speaker who specializes in video game sound. He has an amazing backlog of short, focused sound tutorials that are a lot of fun to watch. Not only does he do great sound design but he also gives great career advice so you should also subscribe to his newsletter!

Robert Dudzic is a sound designer for Hollywood movie trailers (Infinity War!) as well as music libraries such as DAMAGE which he co-produced alongside Heavyocity and Native Instruments. Among his other videos, his “How I Use What I Use” series is a hands on, detailed look at how Robert records and manipulates his sounds. It looks like he’s just getting started bringing great educational content so let him know you want more!

Indepth Sound Design deconstructs film/TV sound (from the actual stems!) so that you can examine the intricate layers that go into quality sound design. There are also commentary layers so you can hear the various sound designers and re-recording mixers go into detail about how the different sounds and mixes were created. If you’re familiar with the Indepth Instagram page then you’ll be happy to know the YouTube videos are much higher quality and also feature 4K UHD picture.

Explore Singapore as you've never heard it before! This massive library includes ambisonic sounds recorded with the new Zoom H3 VR, binaural recordings with the Soundman OKM II Rock Studio and stereo soundscapes recorded with the Zoom F8n, DPA 4060 and several LOM microphones.

The diversity of Singapore makes this library unique with lush sounds from busy highways, crowded food markets/ hawker centers in many different languages, neighborhood basketball games at night, skateparks, horse races, city rain sounds, the countries super efficient underground train station (MRT), and even loud military fighter jets and helicopters.

Perhaps you're wanting nature sounds? No problem! This library features sounds from a variety of cicadas recorded at night and birds from the famous Javan Mynah near Mount Faber.

With nearly six hours of recordings throughout Singapore, we suggest reviewing the metadata and discovering sounds you may not have expected!

The first in a series of WW Audio SFX Sample Packs. This is Volume 1 – General SFX and contains 90 high quality, professional random, sometimes eclectic sound effects for your theatre or film projects.

Few useful sound effects sets of realistic snow footsteps. Non-classic sounding, frozen type snow of ski slopes and paths. Included bonus walking on the snowy wooden bridge. Individual, cleaned and gated footsteps with clarity. Sounds are fully without clothing noises, usage with people moving foley is recomended, so it is pretty universal and elastic.

Recorded with Sennheiser MKH 416 from 40cm distance. Great usage for foley sampling, midi, game audio and more.

Red Libraries teamed up with the sound designers Frederic Devanlay and Thibault Csukonyi to create the new “Mutant Insects” collection

The library gathers a wide range of oversized wings for equally-oversized designed flying insects, along with an extremely rich toolbox. It allows you to quickly and easily create every flying creatures and mutants you have in mind, but also sweeten or emphasize details with natural layers for real-life documentaries, games or feature films.

These insects are more impressive than in real life by their size and the noise made when flying.
So we called them “MUTANT Insects”.
And why not also use it for bird wings…

If you want to be a well rounded sound designer then you’ve gotta know your way around a synthesizer. Synths can give you ominous textures and 808 kick drums that can help your gunfire sounds pack a wallop. SynthHacker makes hyper focused synth design tutorials that cover a wide variety of styles. So watch that Justice style nu disco pad tutorial and then go make some serene sci-fi drones.

Marshall McGee is a sound designer at Avalanche Games that also makes videos about sound design for games, film, and TV (mostly games). His videos discuss how some iconic video games sounds are made as well as going into his own personal sound design experiments. Many of his posts have a video essay style feel and are extremely well edited and easy to watch.